THE COPENHAGEN SCHOOL

The Copenhagen School, officially the "Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen (Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague)", was a group of scholars dedicated to the study of structural linguistics founded by Louis Hjelmslev and Viggo Brøndal.

The Copenhagen School of Linguistics evolved around Louis Hjelmslev and his developing theory of language, glossematics. Together with Viggo Brødal he founded the Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague a group of linguists based on the model of the Prague Linguistic Circle.

The basic theoretical framework, called Glossematics was laid out in Hjelmslevs two main works: "Prolegomena to a theory of Language" and "résumé of a theory of Language."

In 1989 a group of members of the Copenhagen Linguistic circle inspired by the advances in cognitive linguistics and the functionalist theories of Simon C. Dik founded the School of Danish Functional Grammar aiming to combine the ideas of Hjelmslev and Brøndal.

Louis Hjelmslev was a Danish linguist whose ideas formed the basis of the Copenhagen School of linguistics. 

Born into an academic family, Hjelmslev studied comparative linguistics in Copenhagen, Prague and Paris

Hjelmslev published his first paper at the age of 25. 

His first major book, Principes de grammaire générale, which he finished in 1928, is an invaluable source for anyone interested in Hjelmslev's work. During the 1930s Hjelmslev wrote another book, La catégorie des cas, which was a major contribution to linguistics. In this book, Hjelmslev analysed the general category of case in detail, providing ample empirical material supporting his hypotheses. He accepted language as a system of signs, from the point of view of language use.

Hjelmslev's sign model is a development of Saussure's bilateral sign model. Saussure considered a sign as having two sides, signifier and signified, and also distinguished between form and substance.

In one of his last works, “Some Reflexions on Practice and Theory in Structural Semantics” (1961), Hjelmslev even admits that the entire analysis might end up with indefinables of simple behavior situations such as, “I am here, you are there” elements that constitute language as a process of enunciation and not as an imminent structure.

FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS: THE PRAGUE SCHOOL

Leonard Bloomfield

Leonard Bloomfield is nowadays principal representative of the Descriptivist school. 

Leonard Bloomfield himself studied linguistics in the traditional style, spending a year in his twenties at Leipzing and Gottingen working with some of the great figures of the neogrammarian movement, and his teaching responsibilities at various Mid-Western universities were concerned with Germanic philology

Franz Boas

Franz Boas, began his academic career as a student of physics and geopraphy, and it was thought the latter subject that he came to anthropology. The key to Boas's thought lay in the realization, borne in to him on his first field trip, that, contrary to what he had supposed, anthropology is not a branch of geopraphy - that is to say, the culture of a community is not simply a function of its material circumstances, and the human sciences are quite distinct both in contect and in methods from physical sciences.

The descriptivists

During the years at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries when Saussure was working out his ideas in Europe, synchronic linguistics was emerging independently, and in a very different style.

"Descriptivist linguistics" is the term used for the school founded by Franz Boas.

'A rich and adaptable instrument'

Halliday

The London School

London School